Elon Musk has acknowledged that a few people will almost certainly die in the race to Mars.
The SpaceX pioneer made his direct prediction while laughing at how his proposed Mars mission was being seen as a “escape hatch for the wealthy.”
“You will die, it will be painful, and there will almost certainly be no food,” Musk warned Peter Diamandis, founder and chairman of the X Prize Foundation for scientific exploration.
Advertisements for the trip should emphasize how it would be a “arduous and risky journey,” Musk added with a chuckle.
“Honestly, a lot of people are going to die in the beginning,” he admitted, while stressing that it would also be a “glorious journey and an incredible experience.”
It’s “not for everybody,” he emphasized, adding with another laugh, “Just volunteers!”
Musk’s space corporation has launched over 100 rockets in the last decade in an attempt to carry visitors to the Moon and Mars — but some of the robotic experiments have exploded.
Musk did, however, estimate in December that by 2026, his company would have humans on Mars.
Musk proposed establishing a city on Mars in 2015 following SpaceX’s successful rocket landing. He then released a paper in June 2017 about how to turn mankind into a multi-planetary species, outlining plans for up to 1 million people to live on Mars.
